UNSW warns of $600m ‘budget shortfall’ in staff email
UNSW has told staff it is expecting to lose hundreds of millions of dollars this year and is making massive cost cuts to stay afloat after the coronavirus outbreak impacted foreign student enrolments.
NSW
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The University of NSW is expecting to lose $600 million this year and is now trying to preserve the “viability” of the institution as the coronavirus catastrophe continues to wreak havoc on the tertiary sector.
President and Vice-Chancellor Ian Jacobs, in a foreboding email to staff on Monday seen by The Daily Telegraph, said the university is making massive cost cuts to stay afloat.
“While UNSW has long had preparations in place to weather a downturn, the speed and scale of this crisis will exhaust our financial reserves and will affect our ability to remain a sustainable organisation unless we markedly reduce our expenditure,” he wrote.
The professor said the university had frozen travel costs, directed its senior leaders to drastically cut their budgets and stopped hiring.
The senior leadership board had also sacrificed 20 per cent of their own salaries. But it’s not enough, he added.
“Based on our current projections, UNSW faces a budget shortfall this year of about $600 million, close to 25 per cent of our annual revenue,” he said.
The full impact of the virus on the university, which is highly dependent on foreign students particularly from Asia, will depend on future enrolment rates from the cashed up internationals.
The university is now hoping the Commonwealth Government will issue “payroll tax relief, low-interest loans, loan guarantees” and extend the JobKeeper allowance to the tertiary sector.
“While we await developments, we are planning the additional steps required to ensure the viability of the University and I will keep staff informed as firm plans emerge,” the Vice-Chancellor said.
“Unfortunately, we need to prepare ourselves for a very different higher education sector and UNSW in 2021 than we expected.”
UNSW has long espoused its strong global reach, championing partnerships with industry and other universities in China and India.
Its most recent annual report, from 2018, reveals more than one third of its 60,000-plus students are internationals.
Another brochure by the university says the institution grew its international cohort by 50 per cent since 2015.
It now appears that focus on international students, many of whom have returned home, has left UNSW exposed to the full wrath of the global downturn caused by the virus.
The uni had multiple students test positive for COVID-19 but insisted on keeping its main campus at Kensington open. It has since migrated most operations online.